“It opened up the communion of saints for me, and feeling God’s peace through the communion of saints, I chased that peace into the Catholic Church.”

– Dawn Eden Goldstein, Author of The Thrill of the Chaste

A FEW GREAT VIDEOS

Essentially an atheistic Jew, Jeffrey grew up not knowing that Christmas or Easter had anything to do with Jesus! Invited to a Bible study in college he was shocked to realize that Christians actually believe that Jesus rose from the dead. He soon came to see that Christianity is one of the most historically-defensible ideologies. He realized his atheism took more faith than belief in God…

Rhonda began to study Philosophy to find the meaning of life. She found herself drawn to Catholic art, specifically Salvador Dali’s “Christ” and “Last Supper”. Once, while visiting Chartres Cathedral, she thought: How could something so beautiful be based on nonsense? Her conversion to Christ began when she had a mystical dream in which she heard someone tell her, in Hebrew which she did not understand, to say this prayer: God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.

“I had the privilege of seeing my life as though I were looking at it after death, and seeing everything I would be pleased about and everything I would wish I had done differently.”

A FEW GREAT WRITTEN STORIES

Janice Lockwood

I Have Come Home

I was born into an ultra-Orthodox Jewish home in…London, England, just after World War II. My parents shocked the Jewish community by conning an old priest into baptizing me one July Sunday into the Catholic Church. It happened when I was just eight weeks old. My dad had been interned in Auschwitz during the latter part of World War II. Should the Nazi menace raise its ugly head again, Mom and Dad could readily deny their Jewishness: After all, they’d had me baptized, hadn’t they?

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Mark Neugebauer

Messianic and Catholic

Growing up in a Conservative Jewish home in suburban Toronto, I was a regular attendee at synagogue on Sabbaths and High Holy Days, and I lived a committed Jewish life. My father is a Polish Holocaust survivor from Auschwitz, and my mother’s family escaped the organized massacres of Jews in Russia. My sister and I were raised in Canada in a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking environment where all our friends were Jewish, and Israel was our raison d’être. Christianity was the religion of the outsiders, the faith of anti-Semites and Jew-haters, the creed of the Crusaders, Inquisitors, Persecutors, and Nazis. Yet my mother would remind me continually that “Jesus was a Jew.”

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Mother Miriam of the Lamb of God, O.S.B.

A Journey Home: From Jew to Evangelical to Catholic Nun

“May He guide thy way, who Himself is thine everlasting end: That every step, be swift or slow, still to Himself may tend.”

As I set out to do the unthinkable — to study the claims of the Catholic Church — I clung to this prayer, fearful that the enemy of our souls would deceive and render me useless for the kingdom of the Christ I had come to know and love.

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More Inspiration for the Journey

Explore the full archive of conversion stories from former members of the Jewish faith.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS & OTHER RESOURCES FOR JEWISH CONVERTS

Schoeman, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, and best-selling author of Salvation Is From The Jews, once again shows the clear links between Judaism and Catholicism in these inspiring stories of sixteen Jews who became “fulfilled Jews”, as Schoeman says, through their spiritual journeys to the Catholic Church. Using the rich image in Psalm 81 for the book’s title, the author shows how God gave the Jews at Meribah refreshing water from the rock struck by Moses, but He promised ever so much more when they turn their whole hearts to Him – he will give them honey, sweetness itself, from the rock. The sweetness of Christ.

Jean-Marie was attracted to Jesus when he saw a crucifix at a young age. He contemplated becoming Catholic. Instead, he later moved to Israel, served in the Israeli Army, attended two different rabbinical schools and returned to France an ultra-Orthodox Jew. While teaching in a Jewish school, he was married and began to raise a family but his yearning for Jesus remained. Jean-Marie’s moving and unusual conversion story is about his battle between loyalty to his identity and fidelity to the deepest desires of his heart. Above all, it is a love story between Christ, the Lover—the relentless yet patient pursuer—and man, his beloved.

This is the remarkable and inspiring story of how the famous and revered Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, became a Christian and entered the Catholic Church after World War II. Zolli was a world renowned Jewish leader and Scripture & Talmudic scholar, and an authority on Semitic philology. This classic work outlines the spiritual journey of Rabbi Zolli, through prayer, Scripture meditation and lived experience, from devout Judaism to Catholicism. He did not abandon his Jewish heritage but says he discovered the fullness of what God offered in Jesus and His Church. Zolli took the Christian name of Eugenio to honor Pope Pius XII (Eugenio was his baptismal name) for all he did to save Jews during WWII.